It makes good business sense to keep all promises made to customers. This is particularly true for service-oriented businesses that could suffer significant financial losses for missed appointments. In certain regulated industries, there are public service commission rules that impose monetary fines on service providers for failing to provide timely service. For example, in the telecommunications industry, there are Service Installation Guarantees (SIG) rules that require telephone companies to pay fines for failures to install services at the promised time. In addition, telephone companies must issue rebates to customers or pay fines if the telephone companies fail to clear troubles reported on existing services or fail to provide certain services within guidelines and timeframes specified by the applicable public service commissions.
Field technicians of telephone companies, sometimes known as “Installation and Maintenance” technicians, visit customer sites to install new equipment, set up new services, or repair existing equipment. The field technicians, once in the field, are not always able to complete the assigned tasks on time due to a number of reasons. For example, in some instances, the customer may specifically request maintenance efforts be delayed until a later time that is convenient to the customer. In other instances, the customer may be unavailable to accept restoration of service even after all repairs have been completed. In still other instances, the customer may specifically request that completion of the trouble report be delayed until the circuit is verified as working properly. If the time associated with these delays is not documented and discounted, then the entire amount of time that is accumulated in a maintenance “clock” associated with the project would be considered for fines or rebates purposes. As a result, even though the delays were not due to failures by the field technicians or to the telephone company, the telephone company can still be fined in accordance with the SIG rules.
Realizing that they might have been unnecessarily paying fines for delays that were in fact excusable, some telephone companies have implemented a procedure to stop the maintenance clock. The procedure involves documenting excusable delay time of a project with a delay maintenance timer (“DMT”). When the project is completed, time accumulated by the DMT (the DMT time) is subtracted from the total time accumulated by the conventional maintenance clock associated with the project.
Currently, invocation or operation of the DMT involves a number of steps. First, a field technician is dispatched on a trouble report to a field location of a customer. Second, the field technician encounters one or more of the following exemplary delays that justifies invocation of the DMT:                The customer specifically requests that maintenance efforts be delayed until a specified time.        The customer is not available to accept restoration of service after all repairs have been completed.        The customer specifically requests that completion of the trouble report be delayed until the circuit is verified as working properly.        
Third, after encountering one or more of the above exemplary delays, the field technician calls a tester in the office. Several attempts to make the call may be required since the tester may not be available when the field technician calls. Furthermore, the field technician may be put on hold as the tester collects the information or otherwise interrupted during the call. As a result, significant time is wasted.
Fourth, when the field technician is finally in conversation with the tester, the field technician provides the tester with the following information: customer name; customer telephone number; and reason or reasons for invoking the DMT. The time the field technician must spend in conveying the information reduces his or her job efficiency and may increase costs to customers. Furthermore, miscommunications between the field technician and the tester may cause incorrect information to be transferred. For example, the tester may not accurately interpret the information provided by the field technician. Finally, the tester may call the customer to verify the conditions. If the request is deemed to be valid, the tester then documents the delay to the DMT.
As implemented currently, the current procedure is highly inefficient. Thus, there is a need for a system and method that can improve the current procedure. Specifically, there is a need for a system and method that can allow the field technician to input the required information directly in the DMT system without the tester, thus allowing the DMT to be invoked sooner.